It was my pride still, and fear. Flesh was the only comfort that could get me through each night. Joe was the reflex from a previous attempt at solitude, at a maidenly hermitage. I had tried coming home each night to Latin grammar and a series of breathing exercises reputed to aid concentration. My rooms were always grubby. I never had more than two, and a shared bathroom, in old wood houses filled with students and vagrants and artists and the unloved old. The old people had the most power in those places. Their smells controlled the air. Sometimes I thought I would be able to work if only I had a Queen Anne desk and walls covered with gray damask, but that was nonsense. It would have ended always in the same frenzied prowling of cafés.

When I found Joe, I moved in with him before he really noticed what I had in mind. His skin was smooth. Lying with him, pressed against his back, was like sheltering against mother-of-pearl. At night I could feel the faint, reassuring pump of his blood along my whole body as I slept. I polished his little saws and dusted his workbench and brought him thick, luscious sandwiches while he rasped and glued. He made guitars in the living room of his house. He read Spinoza and Pascal and he went out every Saturday evening from 7:00 to 1:00 a.m. to drink red wine and listen to the singers at the Theorem Café. Sometimes he would take me there and we would sit, listening, watching, not speaking unless some friend came up to us. I would slip my hand inside the back of his shirt and let it stay flat against the long muscle next to his spine. He would keep my knee gripped in one big hand. It was peaceful, his soothing flesh, the bottomless wineglasses, the odd faces and movements in the dim, warm room.

That touch of flesh to flesh is the only ease I’ve ever known, the only antidote to fear. The mental conjurings, the mechanical exorcisms, the cranial hocus-pocus was always a temporary and not wholly satisfactory expedient. “Thinking of someone else” was in the same category as the stoked campfire in the tundra. It kept the wolves from pouncing, but it didn’t drive them away. And their eyes glowed brighter with its reflection.

So Joe was all I needed at the time. He even had a good laugh. He was altogether too intent on protecting his hands; he refused to wash dishes or reach into dark places in the attic or handle rough lumber for fear of nicks and cuts. He had a fear of getting an infection that would require a hand to be amputated. He also talked continually of going to Seville to study the unique technique of guitar-making there. He never mentioned the possibility of my accompanying him.